I think I have the comment registration working now. You’ll need to register at www.typekey.com but once you do, this website will recognize you and allow you to post without having to go through moderation (if I so choose…)
The templates might be a bit cockeyed but everything should be readable, so that’s enough for now.

It occurred to me the other day that Google (as well as Overture and anybody else with a search engine) is probably sitting on an Olympus Mons-sized pile of search metadata. Google’s zeitgeist exposes some choice pop-culture tidbits, but there’s much more to be had. Imagine if you could track the popularity of an arbitrary keyword or show the top n phrases containing a given keyword. I’m sure there are marketeers who would pay to know such things, and perhaps Google offers that service without promoting it. If they are, I’m surprised I haven’t heard about it from somebody.

More proof that I should’ve done more Emacs hacking way back when…a couple of years-old articles on Paul Graham’s website (Beating the Averages and Carl de Marcken: Inside Orbitz reveal that a couple of high-profile web apps are driven by Lisp engines.
I’m a bit surprised that there’s not a massively tuned SQL engine driving Orbitz, but I should have known better. The flight search problem, though a computationally intense one, is pretty well bounded – you don’t need the flexibility of an ad-hoc query language, you need raw speed.
This also drives home the point that the cost-benefit crossover point between algorithmic improvments and more/faster hardware is pretty far to the right, by which I mean that when faced with a choice you had better spend the first pile of money on engineering time rather than bigger iron.

By now you’ve probably seen Google Maps – I’m not sure when it debuted but I’ve seen multiple blog references in the past week or so. The service is certainly slicker than what I’ve seen on MapQuest or MapBlast, and I’m sure it will remain popular even after Google figures out how to monetize it. What really excites me about gmaps is not the map technology per se but how it’s delivered. I won’t go into the details here (jgwebber’s blog has a pretty good dissection) but it’s based on loading only the parts of the page that have changed. As Webber points out, the technique differs from Gmail’s mechanism, but the effect is the same. Instead of reloading the entire web page to perform an action, client-side logic retrieves data from the server and inserts it into the appropriate place in the page structure. This results in a much smoother user experience, not to mention reduced network traffic. This idea may not be original to Gmail but I don’t know of another mass-market app that uses it.
The approach isn’t without its drawbacks; it complicates the presentation layer and (potentially) introduces yet another stripe of browser-dependent code. But I think it’s a step in the right direction for web apps, especially those that deal with lots of complex relationships in persistent objects. I’m eager to apply the concept to a project so I can get more comfortable with the design implications.

To my ever-increasing chagrin, I’m not done with the “Andrew 2004” DVD project. These were supposed to be Christmas gifts, and now it looks as though they aren’t going to make the Valentine’s Day shipping deadline. I’ve overcome – actually, given up on correcting – a couple of audio flaws in one of the movies. The discs are burnt and labeled. But once again, I’ve been undone by the case inserts.
Last year I had a terrible time trying to get the printed image to align properly on the form. This year I switched to new software, figuring that even if I didn’t fix the alignment problem I would at least get away from the bizarre UI of the original package. It took a call to customer support (at least this new package has it!) but I did figure out what’s going on with the alignment. Evidently whatever coordinate system the printer uses doesn’t originate exactly at a corner, so in switching from portrait to landscape I had to recalibrate the software. I did so, and got good results. Final step: print a bunch of copies, stuff them into the DVD cases and make a triumphant (if somewhat belated) trip to the PO to send them on their various ways. Easy like pie!
Of course, this would be the perfect time for my printer to run out of ink, which it did. With six copies left to print. Sorry folks, but it looks like I’m not going to finish this week.